A new report shows how differently people talk about climate change from how they did 10 years ago. Researchers at BayWa r.e., a German renewable energy company, scoured 1.3 trillion tweets, Reddit posts, news articles, and other publicly available sources, along with Google search data. They found that searches for global warming, once the most common phrase for our overheating planet, are down 73 percent since 2010. The older expression is simply going out of fashion. Climate change began to outpace global warming around 2015, and the newly popular climate crisis might someday catch up if current trends continue. It’s another sign, researchers say, that the public is beginning to grasp the magnitude of the problem.
The decline of global warming, which refers to an increase in planet-wide temperatures, has been a long time coming. Detractors have long complained that warming sounds warm and cozy, like hugs. It’s also more narrow in meaning than climate change, which better captures the full range of effects that people are experiencing, from wilder wildfires to heftier hurricanes.
“Global warming can potentially be confusing for people, because while the warming happens at a global level, there’s obviously local extreme weather dynamics
— source grist.org | Kate Yoder | Mar 04, 2021